Review by Booklist Review
"Constantly, they were in the process of becoming," a character remarks. That perceptive observation resonates throughout Qian's astute debut collection populated by disconnected young women in flux. Qian links four stories featuring Luna, who appears in the opening "Chicken. Film. Youth." as a 28-year-old enjoying Korean fried chicken with friends, whose dinner surprisingly morphs into a film screening with the restaurant's owner. In "Zeroes: Ones," post-college Luna is a writing tutor, eating Korean fried chicken mostly alone while texting a nameless stranger. She's back in New York in "We Were There," "passing through" lovers' lives. In "The One Everyone Knew," she's a teen discovering family secrets. Two stories feature Nora, whose boredom at work engenders a creepy hookup in "Monitor World," sharply contrasting her teenage devotion to piano in "The Virtuoso." Four friends embark on a mountain retreat meant to reveal "truth without artifice" in the titular "Let's Go Let's Go Let's Go." Qian saves the best for last with "The Seagull Village," about a young wanderer who meets the sole resident of a deserted Japanese seaside town.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Qian's bold and affecting debut collection explores aging, desire, cultural identity, and queer love among Asian girls and women. In "Zeroes:Ones," Luna, 22, struggles to reconcile her Asian and American identities while on a fellowship in Suzhou, China, where she nurses her loneliness by playing a dating simulation game and keeping up a texting-only friendship with a stranger she calls Zero-One. Performance and reality collide in the eerie title story, which features a group of 20-somethings attending a cultish retreat on Mount Haruna in Japan, where the characters' charged relationship dynamics come to a head, leading to an unexplained disappearance. Other stories delve more explicitly into the uncanny, as in the immersive "The Girl with the Double Eyelids," in which a teenager who's recently undergone eyelid surgery starts glimpsing imaginary symbols on other people's bodies--an enormous pink tongue on the back of her teacher's neck, a string of letters on her father's wrist--that she believes might point to secrets they're hiding. Throughout, Qian depicts with honesty and compassion her protagonists' complex inner lives, portraying people who are by turns thrilled and afraid, desirous and resentful as they grapple with the anxieties of growing up. This is necessary and poignant. Agent: Annie Hwang, Pande Literary. (Aug.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Qian's debut collection navigates between New York and Los Angeles, the U.S. and China, as it follows its young Asian and Asian American women through the languid menace of youth. In this promising collection's opening story, "Chicken. Film. Youth," Luna is back in her childhood city, LA, meeting up with friends who have all reached the point in their late 20s when they have "switched from wanting to get older to feeling like [they] could stand to be a little bit younger." When the reader sees her again in "Zeroes:Ones," she is just out of college, living in Suzhou, and working at the university language center as a tutor while she explores her complicated feelings about China as a "country both homeland and exotic." Luna's wanderings thread through the collection--she appears as a main character in four of the 11 stories--but the interstitial longing she feels about her Asian American identity, her sense of isolation, the aimlessness of adulthood after the driving promise of youth, and the driving question of what comes next are the guiding forces behind all the stories in this lovely but sometimes listless book. Often, the dominantly female main characters are lured into situations that fizz with menace--such as Nora in "Monitor World," who matches with the mysterious agamemnon_the_king on a site for "lovers of the underground" only to discover that his sexual prowess hides darker, and somehow more quotidian, desires; or Emi in the title story, who runs into a childhood friend in Tokyo and shortly afterward finds herself isolated in a house on the slopes of Mount Haruna, participating in an ominous conceptual art project sponsored by the cultish Anti-Civilization Committee. Sometimes, as in the standout stories "The Girl With the Double Eyelids," "Power and Control," and "Seagull Village," a world with alternative rules in which visions reveal hidden truths, alchemy is a black-market hobby, and spirits roam freely is laid over our own to reveal startling and subtle truths. More often than not, however, both the sense of threat and magic fizzle out in the face of the stifling ennui that keeps most of Qian's characters enacting the same apathetic orbits even when they attempt radical escape. Luminously written stories that do not quite finish telling their tales. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
